In reflecting on the past few days' discussions, accusations, and finger-pointing concerning copyright, I can't help but reminded of a passage from Bertrand Russell's 1950 Nobel Lecture,

Quote:

If men were actuated by self-interest, which they are not — except in the case of a few saints — the whole human race would cooperate. There would be no more wars, no more armies, no more navies, no more atom bombs. There would not be armies of propagandists employed in poisoning the minds of Nation A against Nation B, and reciprocally of Nation B against Nation A. There would not be armies of officials at frontiers to prevent the entry of foreign books and foreign ideas, however excellent in themselves. There would not be customs barriers to ensure the existence of many small enterprises where one big enterprise would be more economic. All this would happen very quickly if men desired their own happiness as ardently as they desired the misery of their neighbours. But, you will tell me, what is the use of these utopian dreams? Moralists will see to it that we do not become wholly selfish, and until we do the millenium will be impossible.

Funny how he basically mooned the economics profession 20 years before the Swedish national bank convinced the Nobel Foundation to hand out a price for economics under Nobels name.

Oh man, I remember this Kim Dotcom guy, he used to call himself Kimble. One of my favorite early Flash animators, Ian Hothersall, made an animation for him. You might remember it if you're of that era: http://fliiby.com/file/837505/juf2xuoiiy.html

Memories.

He really pissed off the RIAA with that Megaupload song. I bet you that's why he got arrested instead of just taken offline. They didn't do this to Napster or Kazaa or Limewire, after all.

What ticks me off is that Kimble is such a #$%bag that he failed the "good character" provision when he applied to become a New Zealand resident. He bought $10m in government bonds and made a donation to charity and waddaya know... "Welcome to New Zealand, Sir".

Why do the US do anything when it comes to other countries? Because they can. It's amusing how the most corrupt country in the world seem to be "co-operative" when they want something but "up yours, I'm an American" when someone approaches them.

One country asserting it's law on another country is just plain bonkers. I am never surprised when people target these a-holes for bombs and worse terror attacks, they deserve everything they get.

Why do the US do anything when it comes to other countries? Because they can. It's amusing how the most corrupt country in the world seem to be "co-operative" when they want something but "up yours, I'm an American" when someone approaches them.

One country asserting it's law on another country is just plain bonkers. I am never surprised when people target these a-holes for bombs and worse terror attacks, they deserve everything they get.

Such an angry person, it makes me sad to think you believe this is properly reciprocated though violence.

I am not saying that distribution of illegal content is ok, but killing all other legitimate content as a sort of a "collateral damage" in this case is surely not ok and I would like to suggest the course of action in this case.

They should get together and file a class-action suit against the US government and involved parties (RIAA, MPAA, etc), and seek damage claims for:

- Lost content- Lost access to the content- Lost service that has been paid for- Inconvenience caused to those usually served with the content (themselves if it was private data)- Financial loss (in form of subscription fees and lost revenue if any)

If they did that, then the US government and others involved would have to pony up more cash than they seek in damages from MegaUpload. That would teach them an important lesson not to wield an axe so unselectivelly.

With the seizing of MegaUpload, it is entirely possible that the US Government, through it's alphabet-agencies like the FBI, has stirred up a hornets nest in all of us, particularly with this action happening directly on the heels of the mass anti-SOPA/PIPA web-blackout event, when far huger numbers of people than usual were paying great attention to all this stuff. I'd say it's time for us all to demand that "IP pirates" and "copyright infringers" no longer be treated or sentenced as if it were a worse crime than murder, extortion, or maybe even terrorism. If a person can spend more time in prison for running a download site, or even a site linking to a bunch of download sites, than he can for embezzling a bunch of people's retirement funds... something is seriously wrong. Laws need to change. Drastically.

There are always different sides to a story. #Megaupload If you provide content freely why not provide it for FREE?Wikipedia and other sites are operated with the help of the users themselves by donations which is actually investing money in themselves and the things that matter to them. So why putting limitatios on content, like the 72 mins restriction? Why providing subscribtion services for content you do not own?

MegaUpload was not charging for access to the files stored on it, since you could still download them without paying them a dime. What people paid for was the privilege of downloading stuff *sooner* and *faster* than the non-paying people getting files from there. In short, those that didn't subscribe but who wanted to download a file hosted there had to sit through a countdown first before they could get at the file, and then the download came at a slower rate than it did for those who were paying members of MegaUpload. Simple as that.

Fuck, there goes the rest of my subscription. Now I'm gonna have to watch TV some other way. Hollywood can kiss my ass, they're never getting another dime outta me, but that's been true for a few years now anyways. Assholes.

Try bittorrent. Since the content is hosted by the actual users, it must be harder for the government to take down.

Though you easily could bypass the restriction by using a proxy, or download files at slower tempo, Megaupload is still a business that restricts content or to be exact TIME on using that content, or downloading. AND THEN AGAIN, servers cost money, bandwidth costs money etc. I enjoyed the services of Megavideo not less than anyone else. And it made it possible for me to actually CHOOSE what to watch, and to say NO to the television screen forever, while watching the movies and tv shows I WANTED TO WATCH at a higher speed that any other service available thanks to the enormous amount of servers they can afford to buy, thanks to their subscription service. So if I go with logic that makes sense. If I go with my heart, I FEEL that all content should be FREE and already IS in fact. Charging money for it (in some way or another), it's so 90's. Surely there must be another way.

If all the internal email stuff that they're saying is true, I'd support this. It is a little odd in how thoroughly they've gone after the site, but I'm not opposed to legitimate anti-piratical action.

Why do we need SOPA/PIPA if they can already do this?

I also support this. It's so easy to set up some 'creative sharing' project on a website like MegaUpload, to claim that the intention of the site is genuine. Bullshit, MegaUpload was there to easily get hold of other people's material, and the fact that the site owners earned money offering stuff they didn't have the copyright of makes them criminals. And indeed, if the FBI can do this already, what do we need SOPA/PIPA for?

All this is just a template for new locker sites to use and really weakens the MPAA/RIAA. I'm sure everyone in the bust was well rewarded and the booty will be divided up. This is too much off a show to really be taken serious.

I hate things like this, I don't feel sorry for mega upload per se, they got what they deserved for not obeying laws on countries they operated out of. But there are as always innocents who utilised there servers for game mods, who are left without there own lawful property because the server was taken completely by FBI.

It highlights that the existing laws are already too draconian, with witch hunts being the normal behaviour, that would be like sinking a cruise liner because some people on it were criminals.

Sorry for mega upload/pirates no. Innocents yes. Anyone who has items that are legitimate should be able to have their files sent to them. That would make this issue palatable as far as I am concerned.

If you stored original content on Megaupload (and I'm sure that a lot of people did) could you go after the government for either theft or copyright infringement?

To be serious...I wonder how many new investigations into all sorts of crimes will start up once they're done scanning everybody's files? I can't imagine that the government is going to have all of that data and not look through it.

Quote:

Motor bikes, jet skis, artwork, and even 60 Dell servers could all be forfeit to the government if it can prove its case against the members of the "Mega Conspiracy."

This was so cute in its naiveness. All of their stuff is already forfeit to the government. It just hasn't been formalized yet. A conviction is not necessary, just a desire to have it.

Hollywood can kiss my ass, they're never getting another dime outta me, but that's been true for a few years now anyways. A*******.

I always love it when people get caught breaking the rules and then whine about everybody else being awful because it didn't work out. It's almost a parody of self-indulgence and inability to accept responsibility for one's actions.

Um, unless it was parody, in which case, you got me :-)

Um, except that no, that was not a parody. The big media mafiaa (Hollywood) can kiss my ass. They are ruthlessly fighting a war against the public rights, and are therefore the enemy, and I WILL NOT FUND THE ENEMY.

You imply that I was caught breaking the rules and my post was sour grapes. I subscribed to MU/MV to transfer large files between friends (a legitimate service they provided), and to watch old episodes of TV shows that had already been publicly broadcast in the past. The last few months of my subscription has now been stolen from me, regardless of its legality, because of a media mafia fight (this legal action). Was this whole thing so life and death that they couldn't use legal means to stop all new subscriptions, let the old ones play out, and then wind the whole thing down however the evidence justified? Nope, they just dropped the nuke hammer and threw away my money. Fuck them. Contrary to the hysteria, the sky was not falling.

And if the TV show public uploading and watching was illegal, then it shouldn't be as far as I'm concerned. That was the general public using new media to provide a new service for ourselves, at our own expense, that corporate interests have otherwise failed to provide, with content WE already had public access to anyways. The laws that make that illegal are just examples of some of the potential rights the public has lost or failed to enjoy because of our ongoing battle with the big media mafia throughout history. They have the money, so their OPINIONS AND DESIRES become the law, and the public opinion does not. That's how it goes, but it does not make the way things are somehow right.

You can be big media's moral supporter, and believe that every current IP law is God's own perfected ethical truth, whatever you and I believe is irrelevant anyways. Big media will continue to take whatever they can get by whatever means they can muster. They have no sense of ethics or morality or justice whatsoever in this. It's all just big business for profit, with paid access to the lawmakers as one of many tools to achieve that profit. If they could just change the laws to tithe us all directly and give nothing back, they surely would. This is not about ethics or right and wrong, it is about TAKING BY WHATEVER MEANS AVAILABLE. They take money, we take files, it's just like everything else these days, it's dog eat dog, and everyone is fair game.

Would be interesting to compare those plates to the kind of stuff found on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.

Or anywhere else with strong type 'A' personalities or expressive people. Wall Street, despite being popular to hate on at the moment, is hardly the bastion of vanity plates. You'll find as many or more in Hollywood, the music industry, owned by doctors, soccer moms, car enthusiasts, etc. Hating on Wall Street is played out, give it a rest.

The MPAA [said] "This criminal case, more than two years in development, shows that law enforcement can take strong action to protect American intellectual property stolen through sites housed in the United States."---------So... why do we need to throw away even more of our rights with SOPA?

Why do the US do anything when it comes to other countries? Because they can. It's amusing how the most corrupt country in the world seem to be "co-operative" when they want something but "up yours, I'm an American" when someone approaches them.

One country asserting it's law on another country is just plain bonkers. I am never surprised when people target these a-holes for bombs and worse terror attacks, they deserve everything they get.

Such an angry person, it makes me sad to think you believe this is properly reciprocated though violence.

All because they took away your favorite bootlegging site.

He's not complaining about Megaupload at all. That's just some silly ad hom you invented to brush off his actual message which was that America enforces its will on the rest of the world through violence all the time and the will of America is all to often corrupted by corporate interests just like in this case.

I think the government's action today will put people off from cloud storage for a long time. Mega upload may have had a lot of illegal content but there was also a lot of user created content. XDA developers uploaded a lot of their roms to megaupload. If the government can shut down a site because they have illegal content even when they are trying to remove it then what will keep sites like dropbox, ubuntuone and gstorage safe? Heck 90% of my google music content is pirated material, what's to keep the government from shutting that service down?

I was never a fan of the cloud anyway

This is precisely the only reason I ever used MU. In fact, I wasn't even aware of MU's existence til I bought my first android phone and began installing custom OS'es onto it. Never a good idea to use a paid service to transmit copyrighted files. Far too many logs and records of a person's true identity / physical location attached to the file transfers. Any pirates who used MU for such purposes were certainly not the sharpest tools in the shed.. Now, all of their info attached to their Paypal transactions are in the hands of the FBI.

Interesting read, a lot of great infomation. Would have been nice if it wasnt so slanted AGAINST megaupload, but all in all enjoyable. Im curious to see how this plays out in court. I feel like this was a shot in the foot for SOPA/PIPA who are trying to cry about now having the tools or ability to do exactly this.

But honestly, im not sure how they can justify going after megaupload, when i could rattle off about 10 filesharing websites just off the top of my head that do EXACTLY - or worse- than what megaupload does.

Oh, fabulous. When do the Feds get around to indicting Goldman Sachs et al for gaming and crashing the economy? Leaving the US Treasury on the hook for TWENTY-FOUR TRILLION DOLLARS. Pirates? Movies? Who gives a (*@#? There's no comparison between the crimes of the 'too big to fail' banks and Megaupload.

Why do the US do anything when it comes to other countries? Because they can. It's amusing how the most corrupt country in the world seem to be "co-operative" when they want something but "up yours, I'm an American" when someone approaches them.

One country asserting it's law on another country is just plain bonkers. I am never surprised when people target these a-holes for bombs and worse terror attacks, they deserve everything they get.

Why do the US do anything when it comes to other countries? Because they can. It's amusing how the most corrupt country in the world seem to be "co-operative" when they want something but "up yours, I'm an American" when someone approaches them.

One country asserting it's law on another country is just plain bonkers. I am never surprised when people target these a-holes for bombs and worse terror attacks, they deserve everything they get.

Such an angry person, it makes me sad to think you believe this is properly reciprocated though violence.

All because they took away your favorite bootlegging site.

He's not complaining about Megaupload at all. That's just some silly ad hom you invented to brush off his actual message which was that America enforces its will on the rest of the world through violence all the time and the will of America is all to often corrupted by corporate interests just like in this case.

The disconnect he evidenced is almost as bad as how people today have been trained by the media and universities to automatically associate "corporate interests" with rightwing/GOP/Republicans despite the evidence repeatedly showing the leftist media elites in America are the most egregious at crushing rights and taking away consumer freedoms. Funny how their political views are rarely if ever noted. Wouldn't want to upset the faulty stereotype they've worked so hard to establish, perhaps.

I have never seen a link to Megavideo or Megaupload that was NOT copyrighted content. And I've seen thousands.

Why where you looking a Megaupload links. Oh my God. Yes FBI. There is a man here who confessed that he looked at links. I think hes in a conspiracy to comment copyright infringement or least thinking about it. Hes a thought criminal that should have no bail. Hes a dirty thought pirate that needs to be put away. Thanks Mr FBI man. I Hope that tack on your ass is healing. Goodbye.

The indictment goes after six individuals, who between them owned 14 Mercedes-Benz automobiles with license plates such as "POLICE," "MAFIA," "V," "STONED," "CEO," "HACKER," GOOD," "EVIL," and—perhaps presciently—"GUILTY." The group also had a 2010 Maserati, a 2008 Rolls-Royce, and a 1989 Lamborghini. They had not one but three Samsung 83" TVs, and two Sharp 108" TVs. Someone owned a "Predator statue." Motor bikes, jet skis, artwork, and even 60 Dell servers could all be forfeit to the government if it can prove its case against the members of the "Mega Conspiracy."

Just don't know why they're releasing all this info about a case they're going to be throwing before a judge. Why does any of this matter? Either they're guilty or they're not, but the public has no reason to know this stuff.

So, now that MegaUpload has been seized, are they going to sift through all of the transaction records to see who downloaded "infringing" content?

I know I've downloaded some things from MU, but can't remember what they were or when they did it. Some folks were using it as a legitimate file hosting site, like for utilities. I think I downloaded a Windows restore cd for compaq bus computer I had which had a legitimate key on it.